KION Group Accelerates Data Access on Near Real-Time Supply Chain Analytics with Dremio's Data Lakehouse

The Business

KION Group AG is the largest manufacturer of forklift trucks and warehouse equipment in Europe. The company was founded in 2006, and the history of the companies and brands that were brought together under one umbrella dates back to 1819.

Today, KION Group deploys over 1.7 million trucks worldwide across various industries in over 100 countries and 6 continents.

The Challenge

When Linde AG and its forklift business became part of the KION Group, the result was a monolithic IT infrastructure made up of different systems. Data silos made company-wide analysis difficult, and making data-based decisions had become increasingly challenging, with discussions more focused on the accuracy of the information than on operational intelligence. In addition, many existing solutions offered only a limited scope for analysis. Massive amounts of data from various SAP apps and other sources could not be combined, resulting in a high risk of overlooking operational data

Use Case: The Warranty Division

The IT department undertook a challenging task: creating a unified analytics foundation. This involved dismantling data silos and migrating all data to a central architecture on Microsoft Azure. The solution needed to provide easy data access for business users in over 50 use cases while minimizing the impact on the business.

The Warranty Division aimed to improve equipment and components by analyzing data from repairs that occurred during the warranty period, a major cost factor. They also analyzed the quality of parts produced by suppliers and identified cost-saving opportunities. Service technicians' reports were another crucial source of quality information. However, data supporting their assessments did not exist.

The Solution

In 2020, KION began looking for a solution that could meet the requirements of all their business units and use cases. The result was the KION Analytics Strategy and the KION Analytics Platform (KAP), a cloud-based platform based
on Microsoft Azure.

With a growing number of data and users, the existing Azure Synapse data warehouse and Analysis Service cubes could not scale in terms of performance and cost. As a result, Power BI dashboards took over 30 minutes to refresh. Tim Kappel, IT Business Partner Digital & E-Commerce (global) at KION, discovered Dremio during his search for faster alternatives for executing queries over their Azure data lake and for supporting data delivery to their various analytical tools. Kappel says, "We were looking for a solution that could provide users with all the information they required near real-time. In a proof-of-concept between Dremio and Azure Synapse, Dremio was superior in terms of performance – and the costs were reasonable, too. Plus, we could avoid vendor lock-in."

Conclusion

Dremio on Azure reduces the complexity of data copying for analysts to access data, providing an optimal and transparent total cost of ownership (TCO) while future-proofing KION Group’s data architecture for growth. Building a data lakehouse with Dremio means that non-technical users, such as product owners or service leads, can now run complex data queries without the assistance of IT. Reports that used to take hours to run can now be refreshed in seconds. These types of insights allow end users to quickly analyze their data in Azure across several use cases today and in the future.